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Anyone who’s returned from an event with a virtual armful of photos may have been frustrated with Facebook’s upload interface, which until now has involved a less-than-intuitive file browser. The company is quietly solving that problem: an update pushing out to individual users lets them drag-and-drop photos into a new post, like we’ve seen on other social networks, and to a newly streamlined Messages format that’s rolling out at the same time. A much smaller circle is seeing a second update. Facebook has confirmed to ABC News that it’s conducting limited trials of an updated Timeline that moves the news feed to a single column, replaces the thumbnail navigation with simpler-looking tabs and makes all profile page information available through scrolling. A spokesperson wouldn’t say if or when the new Timeline would reach the wider public, but history points to “when” being more likely. They did however mention that the new privacy shortcuts, activity log and untagging tool would be going live for all users starting tonight, and we’ve already seen them pop up on some of our accounts.

A Wells notice is a warning that the SEC is likely to bring charges against an individual or company. Typically, it’s done for a viable reason. In this case, the SEC is totally over-reaching, acting like a idiotic overly bureaucratic organization.

It’s moves like this that make it seem like government bureaucracy really does smother businesses.

Here’s what happened.

In July, Hastings posted to his Facebook page that Netflix had had 1 billion hours of streaming in June. The stock jumped that day.

If Hastings had just shared this information with a small circle of friends, you could make an argument that the information wasn’t publicly disseminated. But Hastings has 200,000 subscribers on Facebook, including journalists and analysts.

If the SEC wants to use this case to make a new rule about social media and what’s acceptable disclosure and what’s not, that’s fine. It should do that.

But to punish a company and executive for taking advantage of a new service to publicly disseminating information in a way that is vastly more public than SEC filings or press releases is unfair. Not to mention a waste of resources.

Bokeh refers to blurry effects in photographs—purposely out of focus shapes that are creamy and wonderfully fuzzy. You can make your own bokeh with just some inexpensive black cardstock.

This DIY lens hood and cap, dubbed the Circle of Confusion Shape Modifier, is similar to a previous one we’ve featured before, except this one lets you change out the “slides” or bokeh shapes easily—so you’re not stuck with just one shape. The tutorial at DIYphotography is very detailed: It tells you how to set up the grid in Photoshop or Gimp, create the squares and cutouts, and assemble it all together.

Check out the original article and the reader comments for a discussion of the techniques used to create the effects in the photos, such as setting your camera to the lowest aperture value. Enjoy making dazzling, beautiful photos!

If you’ve worked in an office, chances are you’re surrounded by people who use cliched phrases like “touch base” and “circle back” every time they’re in a meeting, delivering a presentation, or giving a speech. Whether or not these phrases once had meaning, they’ve long since lost their meaning for many. They’ve actually got the opposite effect now, because they’re so cliched. So which phrases should you avoid? Meeting Boy has a list.

If you know anyone who uses these phrases feel free to show them this post. You can’t blame the words, but it’s worth keeping your language fresh and cliche-free when possible to avoid weakening the point you’re trying to make. You’ve heard my take (and Meeting Boy’s), but let’s hear your most hated work cliches.

Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)

As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.

I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.

– create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)

– social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want

But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.

What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).

detail of low click through rates of facebook display ads

Ideas for Facebook

In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.

1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 — displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.

2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.

3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories – when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.

4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.

Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?

By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare. He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.

Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”

“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”

Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.

First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:

This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.

Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:

Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.

He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.

The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:

Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.

From AllFacebook:

Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.

And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:

Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.

Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?

We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.

1. post your “viral” video, banner ad, etc.
2. tweet about it
3. see if any one of your followers re-tweets it
4. check twitt(url)y to see “twitter intensity” around you asset

this is a quick way to tell if what you think is viral is viral. If even your own circle of followers don’t retweet it, it probably isn’t viral. What you think is cool may actually not be that cool. And sticking it on YouTube and supporting it with a lot of paid media, doesn’t make it viral!

Every year around SXSW, there’s a surge in interest about twitter. This time around people have even gone as far as to proclaim twitter to be “the next google” or “the future of search” etc. Bullocks!

Here’s why:

1) distant from other social networks – While we are seeing a massive surge in interest and usage of twitter, it is still a long way off from the number of users of other social networks; it will take a long time to get to critical mass; and this is a prerequisite for twitter to assail the established habit of the majority of consumers to “google it.” — Google’s already a verb.

2) no business model – It remains to be seen whether Twitter can come up with a business model to survive for the long haul. Ads with search are proven. Ads on social networks are not. And given the 140-character limit, there’s hardly any space to add ads.

3) lead adopters’ perspective is skewed – Twitter is still mostly lead adopters and techies so far; so the perspectives on its potential may be skewed too positively. As more mainstream users start to use it, we’re likely to see more tweets about nose picking, waking up, making coffee, being bored, etc…. This will quickly make the collective mass of content far less specialized and useful (as it is now).

4) too few friends to matter – Most people have too few friends. Not everyone is a Scott Monty ( @scottmonty ) with nearly 15,000 followers. So while a user’s own circle of friends would be useful for real-time searches like “what restaurant should I go to right now?” the circle is too small to know everything about everything they want to search on. And even if you take it out to a few concentric circles from the original user who asked, that depends on people retweeting your question to their followers and ultimately someone notifying you when the network has arrived at an answer — not likely to happen.

5) topics only interesting to small circle of followers – Most topics tweeted are interesting to only a very small circle of followers, most likely not even to all the followers of a particular person. A great way to see this phenomenon is with twitt(url)y. It measures twitter intensity of a particular story and lists the most tweeted and retweeted stories. Out of the millions of users and billions of tweets, the top most tweeted stories range in the 100 – 500 tweet range and recently these included March 18 – Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 preview event; #skittles; and the shutdown of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. Most other tweets are simply not important enough to enough people for them to retweet.

6) single purpose apps or social networks go away when other sites come along with more functionality or when big players simply add their functionality to their suite of services.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.